The forms of publicness about the French Revolution and the Rights of Man presented above are not alike despite shared content. There are discourses that are political in nature, and there are discourses that may be termed art and are of an aesthetic nature. Gillray’s sa-tirical etching combines these two discourses in form and content, and a look at a copy of The Times from Saturday, July 30, 1791 can illustrate how these forms of discourses co-existed in the British re-sponse. On the top of the front page there is an advertisement:
FRANCE IN AN UPROAR!
Mr. ASTLEY, Sen. being in Paris during the Attempt made by their MAJESTIES of FRANCE to escape, begs Leave to lay before the Pub-lic an entire new Sketch, consisting of Music and Dancing, called
The ROYAL FUGITIVES ; Or, FRANCE in an UPROAR !
ROYAL GROVE, ASTLEY’S AMPHITHEATRE,
WESTMINSTER-BRIDGE…
In the above Sketch will be comprised the following In-cidents :
1. The Preparations for the Escape.
2. The Sentinel bribed, &c.
3. The Escape from the Thuilleries.
4. The Manner in which it was discovered.
5. General Alarm of the Citizens.
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6. The Decree of the National Assembly proclaimed.
7. Their Majesties known by the Post-Master.
8. The Alarm given at Varennes.
9. The Royal Carriage, &c. stopped at the Bridge.
10. The Passport demanded by the Governor.
11. The King discovers himself.
12. The Messenger arrives at Paris with the News of their Majesties being taken.
13. A View of the National Assembly.
The whole forming a most interesting Spectacle, as Au-thentic as Striking.
On the second page there are news reports. One is about violent anti-revolutionary riots in Sheffield, which the dragoons had been unable to suppress, and there is a report from France describing the French as barbaric and savage atheists: ”From being over-scrupu-lous in religion, they fell into an open and avowed contempt of all divinity… Atheists in their hearts, and rebels in their conduct.” It may be mentioned that the same sentiment is found in Gillray’s satirical print. A royal proclamation by George R. follows on the same page offering a substantial reward for information about the publishers of ”a certain scandalous and seditious paper” that was printed in Birmingham. Interestingly, part of the paper is reprinted in the royal proclamation. It praises the French Revolution and ar-gues that conditions in Britain are also ripe for revolution. On the third page there is a long and detailed report about the proceedings of the National Assembly only five days old.
Gillray etching is part of the on-going debate in Britain about the relationship between the interior constitutional debate and the link between the arch enemy France and the ideals of the rights of man.
The etching is just one of the many satirical prints of the period.
During the 1780s and 1790s the business of graphic caricature thrived as never before and never again (Donald 1996, 142), and one may suggest that they represent a form of publicness that combined political publicness with cultural publicness, so that artistic phe-nomena became political in the form of graphic caricature prints.
This publicness was extra-parliamentary, and it was for and also by the un-franchised. The publicness outside Parliament was on the move, and in 1792 its voice was heard in the House of Commons
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when Fox referred to it in a speech: ”It is certainly right and prudent to consult the public opinion…one thing is most clear, that I ought to give the public the means of forming an opinion” (in Habermas 1962/2009, 65-66).
The satirical prints were one of the expressions of this public opin-ion. Public opinion now was a force to be reckoned with in Parlia-ment. The number of satirical prints was so large (Donald 1996, i) that they were a mass medium, and because of their distribution and mass production they did not belong to the art institution, though they were sometimes exhibited in galleries. What the prints won in distribution and dissemination, and also in profits from their sales at home and abroad, they lost in artistic status. Caricature is not even mentioned in Joshua Reynolds’ Discourses on Art (1769-91), whereas Reynolds places history painting at the top of the hierarchy of artis-tic genres. The turbulence of the poliartis-tical and cultural climate in Britain during the period of the French Revolution and the changes it produces are reflected stylistically, and also in the forms of public-ness in which it was found. The florid and high rhetorical style of representative publicness is seen in Burke’s Reflections of the Revolu-tion in France, which in itself is the very eulogy of feudalism and its representative publicness. The style of the satirical prints is ironi-cally related to this heroic, representative style in the way that it is mock-heroic and burlesque, and when Reynolds writes that the painter must improve on the appearance of his heroic subject: “The painter has no other means of giving an idea of the dignity of the mind, but by that external appearance which grandeur of thought does generally, though not always, impress on the countenance, and by that correspondence of figure to sentiment and situation which all men wish, but cannot command.” (Reynolds 1997/1769-91, 60) The satirist on the other hand caricatures his characters through the ludicrous exaggeration and distortion of the characteristic features of a person while retaining a recognizable likeness, e.g., through the use of the so-called nut cracker profile with a hooked nose and a jut-ting chin that almost meet.
The publicness, which combined political matter with aesthet-ics, as it is found in the period and of which the many satirical prints are examples can be explained in several ways. One is spe-cifically based in the political debate about parliamentary reform and the extension of the franchise. The factions of the bourgeoisie
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of the period, which were not represented in Westminster, found other outlets than the purely parliamentary ones for political ex-pressions, and the contemporary mass media were employed (Habermas 1962/2009, 65). In the history of the development of the public sphere this is, however, not unique, as political material in the form of news was turned into a commodity by early mer-chants (Habermas 1962/2009, 15). The important point is that the thriving caricature print business took the form of mass media so that we are actually dealing with an early form of mediated, politi-cal publicness here. Another, not conflicting, explanation is the political setup in Britain, in which the monarchy, Parliament and some fractions of the ruling classes, including landed and to some extent moneyed interests, were in some kind of a balanced rela-tionship. In this system remnants of the old feudal representative publicness, which was just as aesthetic as political in its expres-sions of power relations (Habermas 1962/2009, 8-10, 36), may have influenced the fusion of the aesthetic with the political in a public-ness that was bourgeois. As we have seen it above in the discus-sion of Reynolds’s Discourses on Art there is the difference that the high style of traditional representative publicness in its bourgeois echoes is debased to caricature, and the members of the Royal Academy by and large avoid topicality and the French theme (Bindman 1989, 30-31). A more general explanation may be the overall development of the structure of publicnesses, in which a clear-cut division of discrete spheres is more an ideal than reali-ty, and that in this historical period of European upheavals the political debate was so pervasive that it also took on aesthetic forms. In this connection it is of some significance that Habermas (1962/2009, 30) in his “blueprint of the bourgeois public sphere in the eighteenth century” in the field “Public sphere in the political realm” has both the “world of letters (clubs, press)” and the “mar-ket of culture products”. This middle field which connected the civil society of the bourgeoisie with the state also connected poli-tics and aesthepoli-tics in its commercialization of political texts as e.g., the Gillray caricature prints.